Lepore and Longfellow
In“How Longfellow Woke the Dead,” Kemper professor of American History Jill Lepore (who also chairs the history and literature program) offers a serious reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul...
View ArticleThe Dilemma of Choice
In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Captain Ahab pursues a great white whale that years earlier bit off his leg. Ahab, says Sean Dorrance Kelly, is on a monomaniacal quest to answer an existential...
View ArticleTalking About War—During a War on Osama bin Laden
President Drew Faust delivered her Jefferson Lecture, “Telling War Stories,” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Monday evening in Washington, D.C. Drawing on her work as a Civil...
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Swerves
More than 2,000 years ago, a Roman named Titus Lucretius Carus set down his thoughts on topics ranging from creation to religion to death. The format for his observations, many of them highly technical...
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Peter Der Manuelian
In fourth grade, the lure of ancient Egypt grabbed Peter Der Manuelian ’81, King professor of Egyptology. “I think it strikes everybody—and they grow out of it. I just didn’t. For most people it’s...
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Reading Is Elemental
In my dentist’s office, when I was a child, was a sign that ran: Without teeth there can be no chewing.Without chewing there can be no nourishment.Without nourishment there can be no health.Without...
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Inventions in Early Modern Europe
Scroll through images from Stradanus’s Nova reperta, a series of engravings representing geographical, navigational, and astronomical discoveries as well as mechanical and manufacturing innovations...
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The Seven Liberal Arts
These photographs show Jan Sadeler’s engravings of The Seven Liberal Arts, based on designs by Maarten de Vos. According to Susan Dackerman’s catalog for Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early...
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Sundials in Early Modern Europe
These Photographs show seventeenth-century printed-paper sundials—the detailed engravings include instructions for building the finished products, created in this case by curators at the Sackler...
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Spheres of Knowledge
The sixteenth century marked the beginning of modern scientific exploration. Instead of relying principally on classical accounts of the natural world, scholars began employing direct observation to...
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Mysteries and Masterpieces
In 2011, Harvard University Press celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, the renowned series that presents accessible editions of ancient texts with English translations on...
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The Humanities, Digitized
“If you feel queasy, I can turn this off,” offers Peter Der Manuelian. At the flight controls of a small aircraft, the King professor of Egyptology is following a line of tall palm trees along a...
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Digital Display
At an event this Sunday for alumni—and on panels at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) in Austin (which overlaps in part with the famous film and music festivals under the same...
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Forecasting Harvard’s Future
In the second of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) “conversations” on “The Future of the Present,” intended to peer toward the Harvard of 2036, moderator Maya Jasanoff, professor of history, led a...
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An Interpretive Artist of Urban Space
Jesse Shapins helped create Zeega, a software program conceived to create database documentaries, but he is not a programmer. The lecturer in architecture might better be called an interpretive artist...
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Harvard Portrait: Amanda Claybaugh
Editor 1: Jonathan ShawAcademics sometimes say you can see the seeds of an entire career in a scholar’s first book. “I’ve always felt that’s not true about my book,” says professor of English Amanda...
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On the Origins of the Arts
Rich and seemingly boundless as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality...
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Radcliffe Institute Announces 2012-2013 Fellows
TheRadcliffe Institute for Advanced Study announced the 51 fellows who will be in residence during part or all of the next academic year. Among them are these Harvard faculty members and their...
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Harvard Graduate School Honors Daniel Aaron, Nancy Hopkins, and Others
The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Centennial Medal, first awarded in 1989 on the occasion of the school’s hundredth anniversary, honors alumni who have made notable contributions to society that...
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Harvard Honors John Adams, Wendy Kopp, Mario Molina, Fareed Zakaria
During the Morning Exercises of the 361st Commencement, on May 24, Harvard conferred honorary degrees on eight distinguished guests—among them two Nobel laureates, an American civil-rights pioneer, and...
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